Webinar – Innovation Reignited: Why CEOs can’t afford to stand still

I’m Adam Brown, an innovation expert with Ipsos. Together with Market Logic and AlchemRx, we’re launching a new executive content series confronting the decline of innovation and hopefully inspiring leaders to bring it back as a meaningful growth driver. Innovation has never been more essential with today’s environment marked by volatility, pressure chain pressure, and rapid change. While innovation has historically been a growth engine, its contribution to top line revenue growth is in decline. That’s why we’ve partnered to launch this series, to spotlight the real challenges leaders face and offer strategic insight led approaches to reignite innovation across their organizations. Joe start this conversation, we’re joined by guest, Gonzalve Bich, CEO of BIC. Gonzalve spent over twenty years at BIC leading the company through a modern transformation while staying rooted in its iconic and essential products that deliver everyday joy and simplicity. Thanks so much for joining us today, Gonzalve. Thanks so much for having me, and I’m glad to be the guinea pig. Yeah. Also here with us today is Tiffany Stork, our partner at AlchemyRx. Tiffany has experience innovating as an in house CPG brand leader and now as a strategic consultant. She’ll be leading us through a series of questions for Gonzalve. Tiffany, over to you. Thanks, Adam, and thank you, Gonzalve. We’re thrilled to have you here with us today as we kick off this series. To get us started, could you share a little bit about your background, especially how innovation has played a role in your leadership journey and at Vic? Well, innovation’s really been at the heart of the company since the beginning, way, way, way before me. But I have fond memories as a kid of my dad bringing home the new writing instruments that he was coming up with. One of my particular favorites was a a round stick or a crystal that was twisted, and the the ABS really was beautiful. We also had an edible round stick back then. Today, totally inappropriate. We could never pull that off. But it’s been at the heart of what I’ve done at BIC for more than twenty years and and the company. So I joined in a sales and marketing role, and that was bringing innovation to new parts of the world. So I started my career, in Singapore and Tokyo and then kind of meandered into different roles in developing markets, Western Europe, and then the US, and finally becoming CEO, a few years ago. But what’s always been core to our organization is the focus on the consumer and making sure that we’re serving the needs that they know and the the needs that they don’t know, plus as many of the wants as we can possibly get into the product while maintaining the simplicity and use of what we try and and bring to bear thirty million times a day or thirty five million times a day. And that’s really the secret sauce, if you will. When I think holistically about the organization and its evolution through innovation, it really came with the nascent. Right? So my grandfather started with the the ball pen, and then that took off. And for twenty years, it was innovating what you could see and couldn’t see. So, yes, we would change the color or the design of the product, but, fundamentally, the innovation was making it more and more and more reliable. Today, a crystal pen will write over three thousand meters of writing. Now when we kicked off, it wasn’t quite that number. Some of us will remember the the, the hole in the ballpoint pen cap. That was an innovation for safety of children who were at that time swallowing pen caps, and so there was a risk. So we created that innovation. The little hole that’s in the side of the barrel, for example, to pressurize the product when you go up and down in airplanes or you change elevation where you live so that it doesn’t leak. But innovation isn’t only in the product, and that’s really what I’m thrilled that is so embedded in the culture of this organization because it’s one of the things that makes it so resilient over eight decades, of work is we also innovate commercially in how we bring the products to market for the consumer. We innovate in marketing, so we were very early into digital marketing. We’re very early into all the new areas of marketing around the world. And then also just how we operate as an organization. We we can go into that, but it’s really about empowering our people, every single team member, to be curious and to be determined. Because innovation is a and you said it in your intro, it, it can bring growth. It is bringing a little bit less growth maybe than some companies might like in current circumstances. But fundamentally, it is the resilience of the organization because the minute you stand still and you stop innovating, you start dying or going backwards. And that’s really the difficulty. I think a lot of organizations have gone through these last five to ten years, but I believe we’re gonna see some big leaps in the next five to ten. So I’m really excited by what BIC will do and what other organizations will do in CPG. Awesome. Thank you. We have so many so many different, threads that and what you just said that we’re gonna touch on today. So thank you for that setup. Innovation, as we talked about, has such clear potential to drive growth. And a lot of companies do underestimate its strategic role in growth. Not as many as you’d think actually set targets for how much growth could should come from innovation or track it as a total percentage of sales. You know, just from your perspective, why do you think innovation is often underestimated as a growth lever? And what everybody can get behind them. Nobody doesn’t like a good launch party, those types of things. One, people neglect to remember that the innovation of today probably started twelve, eighteen, twenty four, thirty six, maybe more months ago. In some cases, in some parts of our business, for example, when we create a new blade edge, that’s a ten year project of innovation. So first, you have to set the vision for what ten years from now is gonna look like from a performance perspective or consumer requirement and then innovate towards that. And that can be very difficult for some organizations to live through because it requires patience, commitment, determination, grit, which is the word I really like. You have to see things through and understand that designs one through ninety nine may fail. Hopefully, hundred is the right one, but you may have to go two hundred, three hundred. In that case, with the pressure of quarterly earnings or your competitive set, it’s easy for leadership to give up, lose faith, go for the easy change the color, modify the design a little bit, slap a logo here or there, and put it back into the market. And I think that’s why you see a lot of failure in the last decade, And something that we’ve been very, very, focused on is making sure that we have short, mid, and long term plans, and those are built into incentive systems. They’re built into how we talk about the organization, where the CEO spends her his time. Senior management gets engaged or not engaged. That’s really how you get your organization really focused about it. Because otherwise, it’s really hard to stay the course, on these long term projects. And when I think about some of the project products that we’ve brought to bear or to market in the last two or three years. One or two of them were done in less than a year. They were reactive to a situation or an opportunity that we saw, and that’s when you need to see, can my organization sprint? How fast can we really, really go? And I think consumer product companies in the last five years have demonstrated that skill really, really well, whether it was during COVID, the supply chain challenges of the following couple of years, or even in the last couple of years. Where organizations find it sometimes harder is those longer term initiatives. First of all, they have to carry across, in some cases, different leaderships. Your top team changes. This is the the world that we live in now today. Teams change. At at BIC right now, we’re operating our own change, so my successor. And it’s really important to be able to show continuity to your investors, to your customers, to consumers, but also to your teams to make sure that we understand that we’re going to make true on those convictions and belief. Now at the end of the day, part of leadership’s challenge, and then that’s really, I guess, the secret sauce, is also knowing when to stop a project. Because we’ve all seen those never ending innovation projects that in the end, unfortunately, there is no solve for either because the technology doesn’t exist yet or fundamentally, and it it it’s something that maybe we’ll talk about a little bit later, the consumer doesn’t need nor want it. Sounds like a great idea in the fishbowl in the r and d department, but if you nobody wants to buy it, think of the the pen that would write underwater or in zero gravity. The potential for sales is probably quite limited, and you want me focused a lot more on something that’s gonna write thirty five hundred meters for school children around the world, better value for money. Joe those are some of the things that I think are really influencing the trends right now. Awesome. Thank you. Let’s go let’s go back to one of the points you made in that answer, which is about being able to invest in innovation and this tension between long term investment and short term, because as you mentioned, people love innovation. I I think, it can be exciting. People wanna do it. But when resources get tight specifically, companies kind of have that reaction to say, oh, we we can’t afford to invest in innovation right now or we need to deprioritize it to do these short term things, where sometimes that can be, can feel good in the moment, but but in the long run, it kinda creates this long term cycle of not being able to fund innovation and then not having the money from innovation to fund. And you bring such a unique perspective having led BIC as a public company that’s accountable for short term results, but as a family business where you are focused on long term value. Do you have, do you have some practical advice to give, you know, having funded innovation at BIC and having having had the success of being able to navigate the tension from leadership between cost cutting during rough times or investing innovation for long term growth? Well, I didn’t answer part of your previous question, which is how do you set targets? And and I’m sorry. So I’ll I’ll rectify that, and I’ll blend into the second part. When we set out to transform the organization six, seven years ago, we knew that we had to reconnect with meaningful mid and long term innovation. Easy to do the short term stuff. I mean, not easy to do the short term stuff, but that’s generally kind of the basics that most organizations can do. And to your point, when the cost cutting starts, it goes down to that point. Nobody really turns that stuff off. So what we said is we wanna get to ten percent of our net sales per annum growth coming from innovation. And you tie incentives to that, but more importantly, you tie management’s time to that. So it’s as simple as saying like, okay. How often am I going to the r and d department? How how often am I getting, samples? It’s my dad, loved this stuff. He he used to walk around with this crazy briefcase for thirty years. The thing was on its last leg at the end. And in it, as a kid, I always remember these ziplock bags of samples, a never ending slew of samples. He was obsessed with many small changes that he wanted to make. And I took that from him. I I always want to make sure that I understand where the current product set is, what we’re working on. And if I use it and I don’t like it and I give it to my kids and they don’t really like it, yes. We’re gonna put it into testing and go ask ten thousand consumers because we’re not representative necessarily of every consumer on the planet, but you need to make sure that it kind of lights up people’s eyes. Now that’s not a great metric. It doesn’t fit on anybody’s scorecard. So you’ll wanna pull me back down to kind of look at how do you run these big, organizational r and d? Again, it has to do with having a shared vision for the future of the consumer. So what is shaving gonna look like in a decade? Who’s gonna be shaving? Why are they gonna be shaving? What part of their bodies are they gonna be shaving? What in our set today is perfectly adapted to those needs? Where are their misses? What do we need to add? What needs to be tweaked? Does the technology exist? I think in the last years, part of what AI has unlocked for us is that ability to really understand, okay. You have these massive datasets. Can you synthesize it down to one or two ideas? And then you can turn to the engineers and go, hey, guys. Can we do this? Like, can mechanically, can we do it? And can we not do it maybe three? Because this is a a reality in our business. Making me five prototypes, I’m sure they can do anything I want. But can you make ten million of them a day at one micron tolerance under zero you know, one percent scrap rate and making sure that every single unit coming off the line is worthy of having the BIC logo on it for consumers around the world, those are the standards and bars that you wanna be setting. And over the last ten years, I would say in consumer, one of the things that I’ve seen slip not here because, again, it’s that that family focus on things, but was that attention to quality. And so you had this mindset kind of ported over from pure tech where you had minimum viable product. Let’s just get something out and see what happens. Well, consumers don’t always particularly well react to being you know, you you take their hard earned money for something that’s almost ready. I don’t believe in that. And then one of the advice I would give to, you know, people who are signing off on those final launch plans is is it really, really ready and worthy of the consumer and your brand and your reputation and your heritage? Because if it’s not, better to delay by three months or six months and maybe disappoint some of your stakeholders than to disappoint all of your customers and all of your consumers. Because building reputations takes decades. And as we know, losing them is in minutes in today’s world. Fantastic advice. Hundred percent, Pat. I I love that one of the other things you brought up just now is is AI and still being grounded in the consumer insight because so many people, I think, see AI as, like, the shiny future. Right? And unless that’s grounded in consumer insight where you’re solving something for the consumer, either that they do know or don’t know, but but it’s still based in their Rini. It can just be innovation for innovation’s sake, which is not going to be viable in the market. So I’d like to talk a little bit more about consumer insights where, you know, innovation rooted in insight has such higher potential, having the right consumer and market insights, to guide strong decisions and development and make sure that the product is ready. You know, many companies understand the idea of being consumer centric and they aim to do that, But many fall, can fall short or struggle to really connect those dots between insights and innovation. Can you share, more about how BIC uses consumer understanding and data driven insights in its innovation process and potentially give an example of a launch that was successful because of it? Sure. But so, to answer your question, I think you need to go one even click back is how much data do you have and where is it coming from? I remember many years ago, early on in my career, hearing, from a perspective of fill in country or office or team. Well, that’s that’s really interesting, but every person on the planet is our consumer, in in my case. How do you represent them? How are you representing a fourteen year old Japanese schoolgirl writing exams in tiny little characters in a blue book where, you know, it’s one millimeter by one millimeter square, and you’re on wide rule in the u in in Nebraska. Maybe let’s not. So the first thing that, our organization focuses on is the breadth and depth of of the data. And we invest quite a lot, in getting it and making sure that it’s agnostic as possible. So we use outside agencies. We really triple test, the data. Now AI is really good at taking insane numbers of data points and synthesizing them for you, but kind of like, you know, asking chat GPT, a quick offhanded comment. You wanna make sure that you check its answer and you cross off Joe that you really do need those data science teams. And, again, those are, long term investments that I think organizations would do well to maintain, and augment for those who haven’t really built them out. So you do that. But let’s say you take a hundred million data points and you you bring them down to ten. That’s not an insight yet. Now that this is where the real magic happens is taking that and turning in into insight, let’s say a hundred. And ninety of them are probably gonna be dead wrong once you start testing them against the real world. Okay. So now we’re down to ten usable insights. Okay. How many of those back to what I was saying. Do we have the technology to fulfill? Actually, only eight. Great. So we’ve gone from the top that huge number down to eight projects. And you spread that those out over time. You say, okay. Three of those we can do this year. Two of those we can slot them into next year because that’s about how long it’s gonna take. And one or two of them, undetermine how long it’s gonna take. And back to that time quotient and that ability to say, I believe I have the grid, I have the resilience, I have the determination, and I have a vision to achieve. So I’m not giving up until we’ve solved problem x y z. To your question about, innovation and and and flowing it into a product, well, having made, this product, the the j six lighter for thirty, forty years now, hundreds and hundreds of millions of them, we knew that consumers were burning their fingers in certain angles in certain ways. Right? Not burning. Burning is the wrong word, but they were getting hot. And so we needed to find a better way to get around that. We have a long barbecue lighter, but that’s a little bit too much to light, let’s say, just a candle on the table. So we created easy reach, which had has that short wand on it, and that came out of consumer insights. And then we found Snoop and Martha as our spokespeople, and that’s really marketing insights. And when we put those two things together, it it’s been quite the blockbusters the last few years. Wonderful. I love that. It’s such a good example of an innovation that meets an actual consumer need and and with the marketing insight to get people excited about it. That’s amazing. When we when we look at companies innovation funnels, we like to look at the balance between renovation and innovation. Renovation being products that are slightly better or a different version. This would fit the kind of color changes that you talked about earlier in the conversation, versus innovations that offer an incremental benefit, something that’s truly different and offers the consumer more value. There’s been a big shift in CPG on heavier end renovations and kind of less of those, in less of those breakthrough innovations are offering new consumer benefits. How do you guys handle at BIC kind of approaching the right balance of incremental improvements versus more transformative ideas? And what advice could you provide executives on shaping a culture of of innovation that encourages both? Joe, again, I’m gonna repeat myself. It’s really about having that long term. On the pure innovation side, you just have to believe, and be fairly dogmatic about it saying, I’m setting aside this much resource financially, this much resource in human capital, this much resource in manufacturing expertise. All those things. And you kinda gotta set them into stone. Now, of course, when massive swings a COVID event happens, yes. Maybe you take a slight pause for a few months because frankly, how many people are in the innovation lab during a COVID type event? But those are black swan events. We can’t plan for those. You those are more the on the renovation, again, my counsel, though, is to make sure that each of those renovations is meaningful to the consumer. And and I flippantly said color change. Well, in some cases, you you do wanna do a color change because the consumer set fashion has told us that we need to move from coral to salmon. Okay. Great. We’ll move from coral to salmon because there’s a real need to. But if it’s just, well, we’ve had coral on the shelf and it’s not doing so well anymore. Let’s try salmon. That’s a losing proposition. That’s where you go back to your consumer research, understand why is it not working. And I think some it’s a trap that people can fall into when a product or launch isn’t as successful as the PowerPoint said it was gonna be. Well, let’s let’s do renovation to it. No. Here’s where I would challenge us all to go back to those first principles insight, understand where we went wrong, and it and really innovate from that versus just trying to put another coat of paint on something that’s not quite working. So the way I think about it with organizations, though, is not to have one team doing a, one team doing b, one team doing c because otherwise, it kind of becomes like your varsity, junior varsity, and then that third string team. That’s never a winning proposition from an engagement perspective. But when you engage your entire organization to think, hey. What does everybody feel? How are we feeling about this product? What could we do better when you have we have more than ten thousand team members around the world? And when we asked them, we created this internal, project called Biccup. And in one well, it’s twenty twenty twenty four. Last year, there were twenty four thousand suggestions into the system, which is totally unmanageable, by the way, without AI. But because we have AI, it’s totally manageable. And then we synthesize that down to about a third of the ideas got executed. Some of them are as tiny as, hey. Can we make the pen cap a little bit more blue or little bit less blue? But others are, you know, this fund the packaging design fundamentally doesn’t meet the expectation of, of mom or dad who’s bought the product and wants to keep it in the drawer for little Jimmy for in three months, and they’re giving little Jimmy, you know, one pen every so often? Those are the fundamental questions that you need to ask yourself, and you can go up and up and up the supply chain. But if you think that renovation is just changing colors or packaging, you’re missing a trick. I think renovation needs to be more, impactful, and you need to set that expectation for renovation being more impactful. And, yes, if we have to do a color change, we’ll do a color change. But that’s really not it’s not even something that we I’m not gonna say we don’t track. You don’t get points in innovation for doing that type of stuff. So in our ten percent, that wouldn’t count. Yep. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So with that, is there anything more you wanna say on the culture of innovation? Just being able to activate at every level this idea that ideas can come from anywhere, but then there’s still kind of this this gut check on on is it right for the consumer? Are we offering the right thing for the consumer? Yeah. And for I would push that question further. Is it right for us? Is it right for our brand? When you have a an offering as wide as we do, you come out. The engine brings us ideas that aren’t right for our brand. They’re not right for our heritage. For there may be a consumer need. I just may choose not to go down that path either because it’s unprofitable or it does something to the consumer that we don’t feel comfortable with. But those are choices organizations make in two ways. One, leadership, but more importantly, and I hope this is the case in other organizations, through culture. And when you have a strong value set and a strong, this is what we bring to everyone on the planet or our in our case, but if you’re, hey. This this is my core consumer, and you have a very clear moral contract, if you will, with that consumer set saying, this is what I represent, and this is what you should trust. That every single time you open one of our packages, you are gonna get from us Joe matter the product, no matter the format or what. That’s really, really important. And that’s a cultural element that needs to be pervasive across your entire organization because you’ll have lots of issues if that’s true in innovation. But in the manufacturing environment, they’re like, no. No. No. No. Focus on just cranking out anything. We need units to come out the door. Sooner or later, those things are gonna clash. Another particular clash is innovate can be a clash, is innovation versus, you know, your finance department. How much should x, y, z cost? I was reading, something the other day that said, wouldn’t it have been wonderful if the CFO of Nokia twenty years ago hadn’t focused on the cost of the screen being sub two dollars on a phone? What would have happened to Nokia? Now I don’t know. I didn’t work there and not part of it, but it really triggered in me the thought, okay, what are my sacred truths that I’m holding that could be like that and that I need to let go of because they’re holding Joe organization back? And so where that takes us though is innovation isn’t the job of r and d or innovation if you’ve renamed your department or even consumer whatever. It’s really the job of every single person in your organization. And if you have evangelists and fans like we have for our products, you better be listening to that. I think we’ve all heard the story of Legos turnaround, how they went, you know, from trying to sell Legos to everyone to really focusing on their fan base and understanding how that drove new collections, new, little pieces and everything. And that’s a lesson we all should be taking to heart. Okay. Who are my super fans or my super users and what can they tell me that I may be hiding from myself? Or I don’t wanna hear because it’s uncomfortable because it’s gonna require a significant change in my organization. But, again, if you’re not focused on the consumer, well, then your lifespan is limited. I just don’t know how long. But as long as you’re providing that value to the consumer and you’re you’re really focused on what it is that they need and they want and when they have parted with their hard earned money to buy your product or service and they feel good and they feel sustained in its value, you’ll have resilience over time. I don’t know where BIC will go in ten, twenty, thirty. I mean, we’ve been around over eighty years, so let’s project another eighty years out. What will this organization be doing? I don’t know. But I know that it will stay true to its roots. It’ll stay true to its focus on the consumer, and that brand, you know, my last name, will always mean something to the consumer that is strong and that I should be proud of whether I’m in the building or not in the building. Wonderful. It’s so great to hear your passion for the business. And as you transition out of your role, it’s kind of a natural moment to reflect. What do you hope your legacy at Vic will be, especially when it comes to innovation and long term value creation? Well, if if the trend is our friend, we’ve reconnected with innovation. We’ve really brought it back, to the heart of what the organization does, how it thinks, how it’s focused, who it’s focused on. So we we really shifted from a manu back from a manufacturing organization back to the consumer business, that it was at the beginning. And and and I’m really happy with that because I think we’ve found an appropriate balance for the era that we’re living in. I don’t know what we’ll be in in a decade. I’m most proud and I most want the organization to hold on to that curiosity, to that grit, to that desire to accomplish things that may not be perfect first time out and accepting that, you know, failure is sometimes an expensive learning opportunity, but it is the learning opportunity. The the the real loss of value or destruction of values if you don’t learn anything and you just try the same thing the following year or two years later. And when I look at the, you know, the the young engineers and the designers and the marketers that we have all around the world working on the brand and the products, I’m really confident in the future of how we’re engaging with both our customers and our consumers and really what the brand means to people in each of the businesses today. We’re still in our legacy writing business, but we creating we created digital a digital writing business. We added the tattoo business, in lighter. We went way beyond just, you know, the the historical product, and we’ve created a number of new products that we’ll bet in. I mean, EasyReach did really, really well, very quickly, but we shouldn’t expect that’s not the benchmark for each of our innovations. Right? Maybe, we won’t have a Snoop and Martha at every product launch. So you have to be smart, about these things. And and in Shave, where we’ve created the the big blade tech business that powers new and nascent brands with amazing shave technology, I’m really excited where that’s gonna go. And and finally, we acquired, Tangle Teezer at the end of last year. Right? The premium detangling hairbrush company. Well, there’s tons of it. I mean, I was when we did the due diligence, I was shocked at how much IP and innovation there was in that product. And when I look at that road map for the next three to five years, I’m super excited by what it means for the Tangle Teezer brand, but more broadly what it means for BIC and reinjecting the excitement of a dynamic growing category that, you know, pulls the entire organization forward. Wonderful. As a last question, I’d like to wrap up with a final reflection because this series is all about helping leaders reflect and inspire them to put innovation back on their agenda. Are there any lessons learned or advice that we haven’t covered yet today that you’d offer CEOs or executive teams on how to reignite innovation within their own organizations? Well, given that it’s it’s the lifeblood of your business. Right? So if you’re not innovation, you’re slowly going backwards or worse. After people, which is absolutely the first priority, this is the second one. So these are the meetings you don’t cancel. This is the, you know, brainstorming session you don’t find an excuse not to go to. You don’t delegate it. And sometimes I’m a bit surprised, not seeing the most senior executives of organizations really focused on the consumer and the customer depending on, you know, who the ultimate, buyer and user of your product or services. But in in let’s talk about consumer. I’m sometimes surprised at how little time executives, because of the pull from many, many other things in their day, aren’t spending enough time really understanding the why of of their their future innovation, their lifeblood, and really becoming as passionate about it, as one might be. If you’re not an evangelist for your own product, then I really don’t know who should be. And if you can’t get excited by something, well, that’s probably feedback that you need to be giving your teams. At least for me, I can tell you that no matter how bad the day, this is the thing that makes every day bright. So if you need kind of that ray of sunshine or that that hit of vitamin c, go get it with your innovation teams. And Joe the the question earlier, set some goals for yourself. Maybe set one that you tell everybody else and set one just for yourself on the underside, of the sticky Joe, if you will, but, you know, be ambitious. Go after it. And we set ten percent. And last year, we didn’t get to ten percent. And as disappointed as I was, I was still extremely satisfied with the result, and I know it’s just gonna push us this year and next year to get past that ten percent. So once you take that long term view and you really focus on solving pain points, bringing products or services that meet real needs and desires and are true to the brand ethos that you’ve built for your organization and your brand, I I I think everyone works out quite well. Well, Gonzalve, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your perspective with us. That’s all the questions we have time for today. Adam, do you wanna share what’s next? Absolutely. So to our viewers, we hope this conversation give you new ways to reflect on innovation in your own organization and a reminder that reigniting innovation starts at the top. This webinar is just the beginning. Innovation reignited continues through January. We’re gonna have articles, executive interviews, and a new CEO survey to gain fresh insights into the recent decline and outlook for innovation. So keep an eye on your inbox for access to the recording and for future content, content. We look forward to sharing more with you soon. Gonzalve, thank you so much for your time, and, Tiffany, thank you. Thank you everyone for joining. Thank you both. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye.